Michael Nelson: Reuters translation was more accurate than BBC's

The weekly said in an article on BBC funding last month that Gorbachev, emerging from imprisonment by Soviet hardliners at his Crimean dacha in August 1991, credited an old short-wave radio with helping him resist the coup. “Loyal guards had rigged up an antenna enabling him to hear foreign news, Mr Gorbachev explained: ‘the BBC sounded the best’,” The Economist reported.

Nelson’s correction, published as a letter in The Economist’s 12 February edition under the headline “Russian translation”, said: 

• Mikhail Gorbachev’s quote that “the BBC sounded the best” while he was under house arrest in 1991 is not exactly right (“Dosvidaniya, London”, January 29th). That was the BBC’s take from the Russian. This is the translation used by Reuters: “We got BBC, best of all… they were the clearest signal”. Mr Gorbachev was referring to the technical quality of the radio transmission, not to the content. However, he did pay this tribute to the BBC at a press conference when he could not see its correspondent: “The BBC knows everything already”.

Nelson is the author of a book about the role of Western broadcasting in the Cold War: War of the Black Heavens, published in 1997. ■